WebCenter Analytics 10.3.0 has a feature to “Select All/Top/Bottom Options” when you edit various roles. In theory, this is a nice feature because it allows you to select, well, “all”, “top” or “bottom” of different kinds of lists. In practice, it’s tragically broken, and you’ll have absolutely no idea why if you look at the logs without upping the logging threshold to debug. In fact, even once you turn on debugging in the logs, you’re still not in much better shape.

The Symptom: Filters don’t work when the “Select All/Top/Bottom Options” option is turned on for a Role in Analytics Administration.

The Solution: Turn off the “Select All/Top/Bottom Options” for the various roles within Analytics (under “Select Utility: Analytics Administration”), and restart the Analytics UI service.

The Use Case:

I have “Select All/Top/Bottom Options” turned on. My UI for the “Page Traffic Report Preferences” seems decent enough – I’ve got a drop-down showing different types of pages and an option to filter on certain communities. Here I’ve picked all pages, and chosen only TWO communities from the list:

… but when I view the Page Traffic Report on my community, in the report I see every single page in the entire portal – no filter applied:

Diagnostic Steps:

After figuring out how to get Analytics to log debug messages, I fortunately had access to one portal that had a working filter and one that didn’t. So I found some “PREFERENCES” text in the logs, and used (you guessed it!) Beyond Compare again to diff the two different portlet prefs:

That “targetOption” preference looked suspicious, so I did some decompiling to figure out what they meant. I found this in com.plumtree.analytics.core.preference.Preferences.java:

So, realizing that the drop-downs looked different under the “Display” section in the portal that had working filters – it showed “Specify Communities” instead of the “Top/Bottom” items – I was able to figure out that the “broken” portal was using the “All Pages” setting and was completely ignoring the “targetListValue” preference:

The Fix:

I don’t have one, aside from turning off that option in Analytics Administration. But Oracle should fix this by either COMBINING the “display” with the “filter” (so that, for example, users can choose the top 5 pages in a particular community or set of communities), or making it clear that they’re EXCLUSIVE (by adding “Select Communities” to the “Display” dropdown so users can either choose a “top” or “bottom” option, or “Specify Communities” in that dropdown. Bonus points if the “Select Communities” option gets greyed out to indicate it’s not actually doing anything if a user doesn’t choose “Specify Communities”).

This entry was posted
on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Analytics, Bug.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.